The Heart Spoon, with its strong language and disturbing images, is a clear admonishment to stop postponing our practice of virtue and use our lives well. “It is meditation on impermanence and death that persuade us to practice Dharma,” Lama Zopa Rinpoche explains. “Otherwise, we will continue to wait for the perfect conditions, thinking, ‘Not now, but later I will practice Dharma.'”

The text is meant to be “taken personally” and taken to heart. As Lama Zopa Rinpoche advises, it is best read, thinking, “This is going to happen to me.”

The course’s format encourages students to not only read and listen to Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s teachings, but to deepen their personal understanding and experience through meditation and practice. For this reason, course readings are interspersed with guidelines for meditation, for keeping the teachings present throughout the day with mindfulness practices, and for offering service to others.

All of the modules of Living in the Path program are available on the FPMT Online Center. This program is ideal for anyone who wishes to deepen their personal practice and develop the realizations of the path to enlightenment by relying on Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s heart advice and teachings. As the teachings often assume familiarity with the lam-rim, participants are recommended to have previously received teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Ven. Amy Miller (Lobsang Chodren) attended the one-month lam-rim November course at Kopan Monastery in Nepal in 1987 and ordained in 2000. She has offered service in a variety of FPMT centers since 1992 and has led pilgrimages to India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim. She has completed the FPMT Basic Program and is the co-author of Buddhism in a Nutshell and a contributor to Living in the Path. Ven. Amy is an FPMT registered teacher.

Living in the Path is an FPMT program taught exclusively by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, spiritual director of the FPMT. Plans are underway to also draw from the teachings of Lama Yeshe, FPMT’s founder, to offer a program that preserves the entire FPMT lineage.

In Buddhism, we are not particularly interested in the quest for intellectual knowledge alone. We are much more interested in understanding what’s happening here and now, in comprehending our present experience, what we are at this very moment, our fundamental nature.